I'm trying to make some icons, I have the magnifying glass below but it looks all aliased to me.

You'll see in the attached image that it looks more aliased when it's smaller. When I zoom in the browser view it looks less aliased but the border used to make the handle doesn't have crisp edges. I've highlighted that in red.

So I'm wondering if I can make the circles smoother and the borders crisp / solid ( if that makes sense ).

I think the slanting edges are unavoidable because of the border slants character of css-borders.But if you paste another :before and :after, with a higher z-index, you can mask it more or less. In the meantime the small gaps at the bottom of the handle can be closed.As a hook, in the html a <span> can be added: